INTRODUCTION
free. Conservative, Radical, Socialist, and even so-called
Liberal, will all proclaim a subservience of the individual to the
community, a sanctity of State rights, a conception of national
unity, which is the ancien regime reinterpreted in Rousseauist
terms. Much interesting speculation was carried out within the
limits of this inspiration; but it is true to say that no thinker
has made any really original contribution to nineteenth-century
theory who did not first shake off the spell of Jean-Jacques.